Bhattacharya's annual salary is Rs 28.95 lakh while ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochchar is paid Rs 7.85 crore annual salary. To earn as much as Kochchar, SBI's Arundhati Bhattacharya will have to work 604 hours a day at her present salary. Bhattacharya will have to work 876 hours a day to earn as much as Aditya Puri, the managing director of HDFC Bank who gets Rs 10.06 crore annual salary.

The salary gap appears too large considering the huge market share of SBI. After merger with its subsidiary banks, SBI caters to 42.04 crore customers with a market share of 23.07 per cent and 21.16 per cent in deposits and advances, as opposed to 18.05 per cent and 17.02 per cent respectively, before the merger. The private sector banks don't come anywhere close to this.

Low remuneration at the top echelons of public-sector banks has been a cause of concern. Last year, speaking about public sector banks at a banking conference in Mumbai, then RBI governor Raghuram Rajan had said public-sector banks tended to overpay at the bottom but underpay their top executives.

He jokingly said he himself was underpaid and the disparity made it harder to attract talent from outside at the top level in public-sector banks.

High disparity in compensation makes it difficult for the government to hire top managers laterally at public sector banks. It also impacts the motivation of public-sector managers who have to fiercely compete with their private-sector peers these days.

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